July 12th, 2011: Avenging Disco Godfather

What It’s About: When his nephew Bucky (Julius Carry) takes PCP and has a “Whack Attack”, policeman turned disco owner and DJ Tucker (Rudy Ray Moore) begins to investigate, and he will not stop until he finds out who is behind the distribution of this “shit that’s killing our kids”.

Why Watch it Today?: Two things marked the impending end of the Disco era in 1979. The first (and most famous) was the infamous Disco Demolition Night. A Chicago rock DJ’s anti-disco crusade reached a crescendo with this tie in to a White Sox/Tigers double header, in which the fans were invited to bring their disco records to be blown up in between games. What followed wasn’t quite a riot, but complete chaos, with a far over capacity anti-Disco crowd throwing records, golf balls and cherry bombs onto the field, then rushing onto the field during the demolition event and refusing to leave.

The second event in 1979 that marked the impending end of Disco was this god awful no budget tie-in from comedy record (and bad movie) legend Rudy Ray Moore. Rudy Ray Moore’s independently made, extremely amateurish films are actually some of the better films that followed Blaxploitation’s boom years between 1972 and 1976. Once films like Rockyand Jaws were able to bring back white, suburban audiences to theaters the largely black, urban audiences that were packing theaters for Blaxpo films were no longer needed by Hollywood (the objection of groups like NAACP to the Blaxpo cycle’s focus on sex and violence didn’t help either), and the stars of the era were quickly abandoned. Independents moved in to fill the gap in the still-vibrant urban theaters programming, and Rudy Ray Moore’s films are sadly some of the best of the bunch. Unfortunately for him and fortunately for us, Moore tried to play it serious in Disco Godfather, and the combination of a complete lack of budget and film making talent leads to one of the most jaw dropping, laugh-out loud so-bad-its-good films of all time. It was to Disco’s misfortune that Rudy Ray Moore seized upon it as an exploitable trend, and the almost unbearably long scenes in Moore’s club and of dancers on roller skates confirm that not everything in the world of Disco was as glamorous as popular culture would like us to believe.